^ If all you need to do is browse the net or write a letter then you can get by with a 300MHz Celeron and 128MB of RAM, yet I don't see many people doing that.
Eh? MILLIONS of people do nothing more than that - and will continue to do so for years.
Decoding HD video requires a reasonable amount of processing power. I think the first batch of Toshiba HD DVD players actually shipped with Pentium 4 CPUs that Intel was keen to get rid of.
It is the interactive features which use the processing power, but remember a Pentium 4 is an old chip now - you need nothing like the power of the latest PCs to decode HD video, absolutely nothing like it.
Also, and I don't wish to derail this into another Vista thread, but most of the criticisms levelled against it also applied to XP at this point in its lifecycle. For your "average user" interested in writing letters and browsing the net, XP brought two things over 9x: A shiny interface, and stability.
The big difference was it offered something genuinely new - the NT 32 bit Kernel - to home users. It was worth the upgrade to join the 32 bit world and it was genuinely quite a big deal.
For business users I would tend to agree - I have worked for a couple of companies still running Win2k networks, as for their use they have little or no need to change over.
Vista offers a shiny interface too, and it should be fairly obvious that there are some sharply diminishing returns in the realm of "not crashing" that preclude Vista from offering the second improvement. XP, like Vista, was also publically crucified upon release for its absurd system requirements, those same system requirements which are now deemed to be eminently reasonable.
To be fair no-one is implying it is a Vista specific criticism. Microsoft could easily release an OS that ran well on all hardware released in the last couple of years, certainly as well as XP. For reasons best known to themselves (and I have seen lots of reasons punted, cartel with PC companies, lousy coding, lousy design etc) they relase an OS in Vista that does not run well on any BRAND NEW low end cheap PC and only really gets shunting on super PCs with high end graphics cards, very fast processors and about 4GB or RAM.
For a mass market OS that is plain silly - and it is worse with Vista than it was with XP. I remember XP being a dog on new PCs shipping with 128MB of RAM, but on pretty much any new processor with 256MB it ran just fine.
I can understand people disliking Vista, what I don't understand is their letting XP off the hook for the same crimes. A stable version of Windows 95, supporting the latest hardware, would do 95% of what your "average user" needs from their OS.
A stable version of Windows 95 supporting new hardware is what Windows 98SE was by and large - and I know a lot of people who still swear by it - I dont know if you have ever installed it on a new super PC but it is comically fast, especially to boot to desktop.
The point is XP has been around so long it has become a standard, and frankly from SP1 onwards has been a damn fine operating system. This might well be true of Vista on the latest PCs but this of course might change.
What really helped adoption of XP was the release of Server 2003, as Enterprises rolled out both at the same time. Vista will almost certainly have the same benefit from the eagerly anticipated Server 2008.
